Year 4, Month 11, Day 11: With A Friend Or Two I Love At Hand

The Chicago Tribune runs a piece from Bloomberg News which underlines the fact that, basically, we’re toast.

Temperatures in New York are increasing, and after 2047 they won’t return to the historical average of the past one and half centuries, according to a study Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“Climate departure,” when the average temperature for each year is expected to exceed historical averages from 1860 through 2005, will occur in Jakarta, Indonesia; and Lagos, Nigeria, in 2029; Beijing in 2046 and London in 2056, according to the study. New York will match the global departure 34 years from now and tropical areas will get there sooner.

The research highlights the urgency of cutting greenhouse- gas emissions because the warming climate may drive some species to extinction, threaten food supplies and spread disease, according to the study. By 2050, 5 billion people may face extreme climates, and migration and heightened competition for natural resources may trigger violence and instability.

“The results shocked us: regardless of the scenario, changes will be coming soon,” Camilo Mora, a geographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past.”

The global point of climate departure will be 2047, with tropical areas reaching it earlier.

Sorry ’bout that, kids. November 1:

The report on climatic tipping points recently published by Nature suggests that a “business as usual” approach to our consumption of carbon-based fuels will bring near-apocalyptic outcomes by the middle of this century: devastating heat waves, crippled agriculture, and refugee populations numbering in the millions. We need to recognize that scientists are generally a mild-mannered bunch, for whom phrases like “robust correlation” and “statistically significant” are the equivalent of shouting. These authors are not wild-eyed “alarmists,” but climate experts comfortably in the scientific mainstream, who were “shocked” at the severity of their conclusions.

American history would have been drastically different if the citizens of Lexington and Concord had returned to bed instead of heeding Paul Revere’s midnight calls. Now, the overwhelming majority of the world’s climatologists are sounding an even more urgent warning to everyone on this planet. Will we heed their words , or hit the snooze button — again?

Warren Senders